Beginning sometime in the late 90s, the SESC – São Paulo branch began preparing a series of boxsets. SESC is an arts foundation that is mostly or perhaps entirely state-funded, and thus able to produce live concerts, CDs, books, and videos that are invaluable for the researcher or lover of Brazilian music. For this project, the objective was to collect the audio portion of the programs fillmed for the extinct TV Tupi which ran under the names of ‘Ensaio’ and ‘MPB Especial’ but were both essentially the same program conceived and produced by Fernando Faro, as far as I know. They are famous for the informal atmosphere in which the musicians, individually or with a small group for accompaniment, being interviewed about their lives and careers in between playing songs related to the conversation. Sort of like a musical biography. But the programs were also famous for the oddity that the questions are never heard in the final production — just the answers. Nobody I have talked to in Brazil seems to know why this is, and everyone finds it kind of strange and amusing. I plan to call the SESC office in São Paulo and get to the bottom of it one day.

These boxes were originally released with a fairly large book in each package. The book contained the complete transcripts of the interviews as well as essays about the artists by various authors like Tarik de Souza and Sérgio Cabral. Unfortunately, these books are no longer available, but I was surprised just to learn that the CDs still existed, since they had been described to me as ‘very rare’ when in fact they can still be found.

This is not my favorite disc in the SESC boxes( hell, I haven’t gotten through listening to 25% of the CDs yet, as each box contains on average 12 CDs each) but its very good. Obviously those who understand Portuguese will benefit more from the interview portions, which on this set includes an amusing story of Vinicius de Moraes accusing Baden of plagiarizing Chopin while they were working together, and insisting they wake up his sister in the middle of the night to confirm it. Other than the interviews, Baden’s playing is top-notch, and his singing voice is, well, basically the same as it ever was — at times ‘desafinado’ but somehow perfect for his music. All good stuff with the exception of his performance of ‘Lapinha’ which I find really abrasive and irritating for some reason

I was somewhat surprised to find an actual review of this disc, on the cool site and useful resource ‘Clique Music’:

i agree Celia. But I got into a minor argument about his voice with somebody recently — I find his singing distracting, while my friend thinks his voice works well with his music… I think a person can make that argument for his early recordings, to some degree, but his voice certainly hasn't aged as well as his guitar playing (which still sounds lovely on this recording).